They are all individually addressable. The extra voltage is dropped across a resistor instead of being used to emit light by having the LEDs in series sections of 3. That's why I prefer 5V if using a large number of pixel nodes in a small area. The wire is the only difference between those.

They are all individually addressable. The extra voltage is dropped across a resistor instead of being used to emit light by having the LEDs in series sections of 3. That's why I prefer 5V if using a large number of pixel nodes in a small area. The wire is the only difference between those.

OK so changing to 5v string - will have to add 5v power supply too...... More $$......

Click to expand...

I used Ray's 12v pixel nodes (18 AWG wire) connected to a Falcon F16 and power injected through 16 AWG extension cord wire and was able to power nearly 150 pixels with only a single injection point. 150+ required that I either lower the power output to around 60% (which was still bright as hell!) or use injection at the beginning and end of the string run.

I am running 12v ws2811 nodes in my mega tree, each string is 96 nodes long with power being fed in from the input end no power injection at the end and works fine for all 16 strings.

Unfortunately everyone will experience differences with their lights, since these are not technically mass produced there isn't the same quality control checks done on all of the components, they generally wire everything up, solder it all together and run a quick test to ensure everything lights up, then do the waterproofing and test again, if it all lights up the string works, I doubt they would be measuring the voltage on the end of every string to make sure that all of the resistors are working correctly and that the voltage drop is within tolerance, so some strings will work fine, others might not be so great.

It's the risk we take when we buy stuff direct from Chinese wholesalers. If we wanted quality products most of our displays would be half the size, or some of us might not even have displays at all if we purchased commercial quality lights.

As Fing says "Your Milage may Vary" and this holds true for everything we do